ISABELLA WANG is the author of the chapbook, On Forgetting a Language, and her full-length
debut, Pebble Swing, shortlisted for the Dorothy Livesay Poetry Prize. Her second poetry book,
November, November, is forthcoming in fall 2025. Among other recognitions, she has been
shortlisted for Arc’s Poem of the Year Contest, The Malahat Review’s Far Horizons Contest and
Long Poem Contest, and was the youngest writer to be shortlisted twice for The New Quarterly’s
Edna Staebler Essay Contest. She is in her Masters of Sociology at SFU. A bookseller at Massy
Books, she is the web coordinator for poetry in canada, and directs her own non-profit editing
and mentorship program, 4827 Revise Revision St. 

Elena Johnson: Congratulations on having two new poems published in EVENT 52/3. I can see how both of these poems carry themes from your first book, Pebble Swing (Nightwood, 2021), forward. And I read recently that you have a new collection coming out in 2025, also with Nightwood. Congrats!

Of your two poems in EVENT, I found “Choreography of Forgetting,” above, particularly interesting. The Chinese character for forget, 忘, is broken down into its parts; each section of the poem is a footnote to a previous word in the poem; there is a palpable sense of loss that winds through the poem, right to the end.

Could you tell me a bit about how this poem came to be, and also about this word, choreography, that is in the title and within the poem? Your poem “On Forgetting a Language,” in Pebble Swing, also links choreography – and dance – to language and forgetting. I’m curious to hear more about how dance and language – or the loss of language – are linked, for you, and also about two ideas within this poem: “language choreography” and “each stroke a choreography of meanings.”

Isabella Wang: Thanks so much for your kind words, Elena! You are right about the choreography part; as you’ve noticed, much of my work is influenced by the movement and rhythm that my earlier ballet training instilled in me, so this word is very intrinsic to many of my projects. This poem that EVENT published is the first poem of a series, Choreography of Forgetting. It is inspired by Seven Types of Forgetting, Paul Connerton’s essay on the different types of ways that people experience forgetting or memory loss.

My own work often engages with Connerton’s explanation of the third type of forgetting: constitutive in the formation of a new self. Parts you might have to let go to make room for the prospect of a new country, new languages, customs, friends and family.

Connerton’s essay made me want to investigate the parts that make up the Chinese character. I was astounded that breaking the word apart into its radicals told a story of how the word came to be understood in the Chinese language. I started applying the same process to other Chinese words, and, in a way, reclaiming my lost relationship to my mother tongue through this new and unconventional understanding. Later in the project, I started looking at the transformations that many of these characters undertook when China made the transition from traditional to modern characters. With the simplification of the characters, many of the parts that make up the word’s original body are removed; they become faster to write (kind of echoing the speed of industrialization and general rapid progress that the country was heading toward), but they lost so much of their complete history and meaning. Time-wise, the transformation of the Chinese character took place after the Chinese Cultural Revolution, where a lot of literature, language, poetry, art, and culture was being demolished. My paternal grandmother was also persecuted and murdered for being a teacher and writer. So, lots of loss, in the characters themselves, in the country, and personally for me. I’m hoping to do my PhD on this project.

EJ: About a year ago, I heard you read some other new work at The Western Front, here in Vancouver, as part of The Capilano Review’s Dear Friends & series. This new work documented and explored your experience in a cancer ward, and was very evocative. I can imagine that this material was challenging to write. Can you tell me a bit about the process of writing it, and when/how it came together?

IW: Ya, now that my second poetry manuscript is finished and being edited, this creative non-fiction project is my primary focus. The manuscript, entitled Subscript: Annotating Long Illness, footnotes my medical documents and the work of Roland Barthes in his book, A Lover’s Discourse; I am reading about his figures of a person in love, longing for their beloved, and applying those frameworks to that of a chronically ill patient. Whereas Barthes is writing strictly within the parameters of romantic love, my work expands on the ways in which a chronically ill body longs for its former, healthy counterpart that it can no longer reach, or the relationship between a cancer patient and the healthcare system – both saving its life and killing it at the same time.

EJ: Tell me a bit about your forthcoming poetry collection, November, November. What are its main themes, or what sort of subject matter does it explore?

IW: This forthcoming book is all about grief. Beginning in November 2021, following the passing of Phyllis Webb on Remembrance Day, along with Lee Maracle that same day, and Etel Adnan three days later, I was really feeling the grief within the literary community. I had attended a poetry workshop that Maracle had taught, that actually started the Choreography of Forgetting poems. Phyllis was a beloved friend of many poets I was close with. Seeing them so sad, I started writing poems about Phyllis and sent them to them. They sent me poems back, and we kept going. A month later, I was diagnosed with cancer and was confronting new forms of grief – before the surgery and also in the long and very complicated recovery aftermath. Those feelings of grief never left, and many of the poems, written as letters to people I care about, touch on those feelings.

EJ: As you’ve been working on this second collection, are there ways in which your approach to writing individual poems, and/or to putting a manuscript together, have changed since you were working on Pebble Swing, your previous collection? What is your poetic/creative process like, at the moment?

IW: This new book feels more experimental to me in some ways. In Pebble Swing, many of the poems were composed at a very early stage in my writing career, literally when I was still in high school, writing mostly in the free verse form. Later on, I begin to push the boundaries of form more through my work with ghazals and anti-ghazals. November, November takes on more hybrid forms. The poems originate out of occasions, sentiments, and grief, and oftentimes I am inventing a form outright to be a more fitting vessel for the conceptual aesthetics of what I want to express.

Process-wise, I’m dealing with complex health difficulties and setbacks. I am much more limited in terms of my cognitive and physical output. I get exhausted easily. So, new poems appear a lot more slowly. Everything in my life is slower these days. I went through a period where I didn’t write anything new for an entire year and four months.

EJ: During the first year of the COVID-19 pandemic, I noticed a lot of people creating miniature replicas of things – tiny writing studios, living rooms, cafes, etc. I recall seeing on social media that you had hand-crafted a miniature of the interior of Vancouver’s Massy Books, complete with a collection of tiny books that included poetry collections by local writers. Where is that miniature now? Have you been adding new tiny books to the collection, over time? Have you continued to build miniatures since then, or have you been working on any other visual arts projects?

IW: Patricia, the owner of Massy Books, has it with her! It was also displayed in the bookstore for a period of time. I love miniatures and continue to follow artists who do them. Unfortunately, I lost the capacity to do them myself after cancer, because they actually take an immense amount of endurance.

I did have a visual art and poetry installation, Inside Outside Chinatown, on display at Massy Arts in November and December, 2024. It combines visual and experimental poetry, visual art, and oral narrativ to address the disorientating pulse of such a historied yet nuanced and very much “troubled” moving present that is Vancouver’s Chinatown. What you see is a chapbook I found in an old box at the university, put together originally to document an artistic event that was hosted by the Audain Gallery in the ’90s. I have collaged over pictures in the chapbook with my own, “moving” impressions of Chinatown – screenshots captured from a video recording as I am moving along Pender Street, my former neighbourhood of residence – and rearranged them into a disorientating assemblage of visual effects. These pages thus push the whole of the landscape of Chinatown to the periphery, replacing historical perceptions of this space into a focal arena of feelings of fragmentation and claustrophobia from the inner world perceptions of an artist who should feel a sense of belonging and familiarity with this culturally enriched space. 

EJ: What have you been reading lately? What are you excited to read next?

IW: Minelle Mahtani’s book, May it Have a Happy Ending, is probably my favourite read that I
am still reading this year.

EJ: What else has been inspiring you lately – in poetry, or in other parts of your life?

IW: A recent video call with my friend Ayelet Tsabari was very wholesome for my soul.

This interview may have been edited for length or clarity.

ELENA JOHNSON is the author of Field Notes for the Alpine Tundra (Gaspereau, 2015), a
collection of poems set at a remote ecology research station in the Yukon. Her poems have been
displayed on city buses, set to music, and performed by choirs in Vancouver and Brooklyn. She
is currently at work on a new collection. Luba Markovskaia’s French translation of her book,
Notes de terrain pour la toundra alpine, was published in 2021 by Jardin de givre, and won the
John Glassco Prize.